Mourning the Ottoman world of his Baghdadi forebears, Elie Kedourie produced the most influential modern critique of nationalism. Brendan O’Leary unravels the background and logic of this classic of the conservative imagination.

BRENDAN O'LEARY

IN PRAISE OF EMPIRES PAST

Myths and Method of Kedourie's Nationalism

The Irish case does not figure in Elie Kedourie’s Nationalism, except in one undeclared respect. [1] Nationalism, London 1960. Below the book’s titleface there stands a passage from Yeats’s ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’: